Speaking at a House Judiciary Committee hearing this week, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) compared “MAGA Republican” parents at school board members to the January 6 rioters on Capitol Hill.
On its face, just that comparison is quite a leap considering the Democratic Party has framed the riot as an attempted coup, and compared it to Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 terrorist attack, but the congressman did it anyway and even hinted there was a sinister conspiracy, too.
“It was a coordinated attack happening across the country,” the congressman audaciously claimed. “Americans won't forget about it.”
Tina Descovich, who co-founded the group Moms for Liberty during those school board protests, tells AFN that parents attended school board meetings to demand schools reopen during the pandemic, and to demand an end to left-wing indoctrination that violates their beliefs and values.
“To even infer that a parent upset trying to redress their government in a public forum, to lay out their complaints,” she complains, “is anything other than just putting into practice our rights as Americans is really unquestionable.”
From his perspective, however, the lawmaker had a good reason to demonize those parents. The committee Rep. Johnson sits on, Fox News explained, was meeting to discuss a resolution demanding President Joe Biden turn over documents relating to the October 2021 memo from Attorney General Merrick Garland that ordered federal law enforcement to create a task force and investigate school board threats across the country. So the congressman’s parents-are-terrorists accusation was an attempt to shift the hearing’s topic from Garland’s memo and also to move it away from the now-infamous letter from the National School Boards Association that said parents were committing “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
The topic of the NSBA letter got Johnson in trouble, too, since he stated there is “not one scintilla of evidence, either direct or indirect,” that the Biden administration coordinated with the NSBA to draft the letter.
Alex Nester of Parents Defending Education, another parents-rights group, tells AFN that is not true.
“There were communications between the White House and NSBA on this letter,” he counters. “They coordinated to write this letter that specifically likened parents to domestic terrorists. There's no question about that.”
Why is Nester so certain? Because Parents Defending Education uncovered that backdoor coordination thanks to U.S. Dept. of Education emails it obtained through an opens record request.
“It's unfortunate, in the political setting that we're in today, that we can't even agree on the facts,” he says. “The facts are out there.”
